Porches Help People Commune With Community

Watching The World Go By

Out Front

The first thing Tim Vibert did after buying a house in the Unionville section of Farmington was fix the front porch.

"She was sagging. She'd had enough," Vibert says.

The house at 90 Main St. dates from 1840, and it looked to Vibert as though the porch had made the whole trip through time without a tuneup. It took Vibert a month and a half to restore it (or her). The Viberts stuck a couple of wicker chairs out there and now spend many an evening watching the world go by.

"We love our porch," Vibert says. "We love sitting out here."

But, he says, not everybody does. Even though Unionville has front porches the way Mecca has minarets, a lot of folks, over the years, stuck decks on the backsides of their houses and hang out there now, he says.

Why?

Front porches are, after all, so pleasant. They call to mind Randy Newman's evocation of an American past soaked in lemonade and neighborliness: "Would you like to come over for tea/With the missus and me?/A real nice way to spend the day in Dayton, Ohio, on a lazy Sunday afternoon in 1903."

"It's kind of like going to Grandma's house," says Adrian Freund, whose front porch looks out on West Hartford's Westland Avenue, another great stretch of porches and porch life. "We sit out there quite a bit on nice summer evenings, reading the newspaper."

"The passer-by, the casual wanderer along the road outside sees the American family in its porch, [and] can, if he cares to, note what each member of the family is doing," wrote Canon James Hannay of Dublin on a visit to the United States right before World War I. "The American has no objection to this publicity. He is not doing anything of which he is the least ashamed. ... The arrangement gratifies his instinct for sociability."

The good canon may have overstated the case for American open-faced guilelessness, but he was right to celebrate the American front porch.

"They look good, and they're functional too," says Dolly

Northup, several doors down from Vibert in Unionville. Northup's porch is a blue-and-white gingerbread cookie with whitewashed lions panting at its feet. "We sit there sometimes and see people go by."

But even as Northup speaks, the uhhhhhrrng sworn enemies of uhhhhhrrng front porches rrrrrrrawwwwwnnng are rolling past, shattering the morning stillness, elevating lead levels. Front porches, after all, often appear on old houses, and old houses most often appear on main roads, and main roads are home to many cars.

"The automobile drove people to the back yard," says Glastonbury architect David LaBau.

The noise and the stink sent people 'round back to get away, he says. As leisure life swung to the rear, houses were designed with mere doorsteps and stoops out front.

What's more, says LaBau, people wanted their back yards as big as possible, and local zoning codes began imposing "minumum setbacks" (meaning that the front of a house had to be certain distance, say 50 feet, from the street line). A big porch tended to push your house back and shrink your back yard, so people had another reason not to want them.

LaBau thinks the emergence of telephones, radios and televisions also may have militated against veranda life.

"People don't need to get their information at street level anymore," he says.

The dominance of television, in particular, hurt the front porch, says Michael Kerski of the Greater Hartford Architecture Conservancy. A radio on the front porch is doable.

"It's hard to sit on the front porch and watch television," he says.

And Kerski points to a porch predator -- tin men.

"One of the favorite things to do was aluminum-side your house," he says. "So people closed in their porches and wound up with a tiny little enclosed room with venetian blinds."

This phenomenon ate up a lot of porches on sides streets of Hartford's South End, he says.

Front porches play a special role in urban life, contributing to the watchfulness and communication needed to maintain the neighborhood, Kerski says.

There may be a mild resurgence coming.

LaBau says he's noticed more front porches in standardized house plans, such as the ones The Courant publishes as the "Home of the Week."

And even if your house is already built right out to the setback line, there may be things you can do. When Denise Rau and her husband, Ed, decided to put an addition onto the side of their house in Avon, Rau found herself wanting a front porch.

Rau grew up in Greenfield, Mass., and met her future husband in Northampton -- both front-porch towns.

"The thing about this neighborhood is that we don't see people much," she says.

So the couple designed their addition to include a porch looking out onto the street. The enclosed part of the addition is recessed a little, so the front of the porch lines up with the front of the old part of the house. (This was done mainly to avoid blocking a window on the main house, Rau says, but it does solve the setback problem.)

The addition isn't finished yet, but the porch is sittable. Rau bought a used rocker at a tag sale and a porch swing. On a recent

weekend visit, her father took a shine to the porch and logged some serious time in the rocker, watching the parade of walkers, bicyclists, joggers and a very comical sheepdog in the throes of obedience training.

Rau says she considers her neighborhood a friendly one, when you can see the neighbors.

"It makes me feel even better about being able to maintain contact with people," she says